By Samuel Rubenfeld 

The U.S. imposed sanctions on two Myanmar military units and four border guard and police commanders amid a global outcry from human-rights groups about abuses and mass killings of religious minority groups, including Rohingya Muslims, by the Myanmar government.

The Myanmar military has committed widespread, systematic and brutal acts of violence against Rohingya villagers, the U.S. Treasury Department said Friday, echoing comments from the State Department in November that the situation involving the villagers constitutes ethnic cleansing. The military has also used similar tactics against a number of other ethnic and religious minority groups, such as the Kachin or Shan, Treasury alleged.

"The U.S. government is committed to ensuring that Burmese military units and leaders reckon with and put a stop to these brutal acts," said Sigal Mandelker, undersecretary of Treasury for terrorism and financial intelligence.

Treasury imposed the sanctions using the Global Magnitsky Act, which allows the U.S. to target human-rights abusers across the globe and freeze their assets.

Human-rights groups have called for sanctions and other accountability measures against the Myanmar government. The sanctions announced Friday are welcome, overdue and "not enough," said Richard Weir, the Myanmar researcher at Human Rights Watch.

Military operations by Myanmar have driven more than 700,000 Rohingya, a mostly Muslim minority group, into neighboring Bangladesh, where they are jammed in refugee camps. Displaced Rohingya can return, the Myanmar government said amid international pressure, but it imposes hurdles on who is allowed back, saying they need to keep out terrorists.

There are roughly 600,000 Rohingya still in Myanmar, according to the United Nations, and their situation is precarious, The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month. Nearly a dozen Rohingya residents still in Myanmar told the Journal that they lacked access to sufficient food, were stripped of land and belongings, and faced severe movement restrictions.

Myanmar's government blames Rohingya terrorists for the conflict. The country's embassy in Washington, D.C., was closed Friday afternoon and officials there couldn't be reached.

There is a global outcry for action, said Erin Murphy, founder and principal of Inle Advisory Group, a Myanmar-centric consulting firm. The Global Magnitsky Act, which was also used in December to target the general Maung Maung Soe for overseeing military operations in Myanmar's Rakhine State, is a useful method for imposing the sanctions, she said.

"This is one way to do it without creating a whole new Burma sanctions program," she said, using the country's alternate name.

The U.S. decision to impose sanctions on individual units and commanders responsible for the abuses should serve as a warning sign to the security forces that they must immediately cease the behavior, Treasury said.

One of the units targeted by Treasury, the 33rd Light Infantry Division, killed 350 people in the village of Chut Pyin in Rakhine State, about a quarter of the village's Rohingya population, in a single day in August 2017, the Journal reported in May.

Due to Myanmar's isolation, the individual commanders and units targeted Friday may not have much exposure to the international financial system, limiting the effect of the sanctions, but "naming someone specifically may have some impact," said Ms. Murphy.

Write to Samuel Rubenfeld at samuel.rubenfeld@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

August 17, 2018 15:38 ET (19:38 GMT)